Extended Performance

Saving the Republic of Aburiria.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o has enacted in his own life the paradigmatic trials and quandaries of a contemporary African writer.Credit Illustration by Lorenzo Mattotti

The Kenyan novelist, playwright, journalist, and academic Ngugi wa Thiong’o has written provocatively, in his book of essays “Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams” (1998), about “performance”—not merely theatrical action, as in the performance of a play, but “any action that assumes an audience during the actualization.” He cited in illustration the exercise of political power, which involves “variations on the performance theme.” A 1999 interview with Charles Cantalupo, a Penn State professor, elicited this elaboration:

“So much in society depends on ‘performance.’ It provides new insights into certain behaviors. It is central to so many things. For example, you can’t have religion without performance: performance, weekly, daily. . . . Performance enables people to negotiate their way through the various realms of being. Performance is a means for people to realize their unknown, even if it’s only in the imagination. Performance is a very important concept. I have learned from it, but also I have been involved in it.”

In his crowded career and eventful life, Ngugi has enacted, for all to see, the paradigmatic trials and quandaries of a contemporary African writer, caught in sometimes implacable political, social, racial, and linguistic currents.

Born in 1938 in the village of Kamiriithu, just north of Nairobi, in the so-called “white highlands” of colonial Kenya, Ngugi was the fifth child of the third of his father’s four wives; his father was a peasant farmer compelled to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Ngugi attended mission-run and independent Gikuyu schools. He read Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. He was for a time a devout Christian, and at the age of twenty-three married his first wife, Nyambura, who was to bear six of his eventual nine children. In 1963, he received a bachelor’s degree in English from Makerere University College, in Kampala, Uganda, and for a time practiced journalism in Nairobi. The previous year, his first play, “The Black Hermit,” had been produced in Kampala. In 1964, he left for England to pursue graduate studies at Leeds University; the same year, he published, under the name James Ngugi, “Weep Not, Child,” his first novel and among the first to be published in English by a black East African. “The River Between” (1965) and the classic “A Grain of Wheat” (1967) followed. Their success did not deter him, however, from questioning the importance granted in Kenyan education to the colonial language. At Leeds, with revelatory effect, he had read Marx, Fanon, and the Caribbean George Lamming, whom he credited with composing “the first novel that painted a picture of myself in Africa.” In 1968, he wrote, with two others, an article entitled “On the Abolition of the English Department,” asking, “If there is need for a ‘study of the historic continuity of a single culture,’ why can’t this be African?”

Ngugi made headlines when, in 1969, he changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and when, in late 1977, Daniel arap Moi, then Kenya’s Vice-President, ordered him to be detained in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison without charges or a trial. His offense had been involvement with a community theatre in his home village, and his co-authorship, with Ngugi wa Mirii, of a play in the Gikuyu language, “Ngaahika Ndeenda” (“I Will Marry When I Want”). The play was banned; the theatre in Kamiriithu was razed. When the playwright emerged from prison, he announced that henceforth he would write in Gikuyu. His association with the theatre, he has explained, was a “homecoming: the only language I could use was my own.” Prior to this decision, according to Maya Jaggi’s profile in the Guardian, he had thought he must stop writing; “I knew about whom I was writing, but not for whom.” His first novel in Gikuyu, “Caitaani Mutharaba-ini” (“Devil on the Cross”), of 1980, was written in prison, on toilet paper. His last novel in English, “Petals of Blood” (1977), furiously tackled, from a leftist angle, contemporary corruption in Kenya and its government. Upon his release from prison, he was not reinstated in his position at Nairobi University, and in 1982 he left Kenya for London. His exile eventually took him to California, where he is a professor of English and comparative literature at the Irvine campus of the University of California, and the head of its International Center for Writing and Translation; his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, directs the faculty and staff counselling center there.

Ngugi had vowed never to return to Kenya as long as Moi, who had become the President, and his Kanu Party were in power; both were ousted in the elections of December, 2002, and in 2004 Ngugi returned, with Njeeri, to launch the first volume of “Murogi wa Kagogo,” a thousand-page novel that he had been writing since 1997. Met by a crowd of well-wishers and press at Nairobi Airport, the author announced that he wanted to be “in touch with the everyday.” Two weeks later, the everyday in Kenya arrived with a vengeance when the couple were attacked by four men in their high-security apartment complex. Ngugi was beaten and his face burned with cigarettes; in another room, Njeeri was sexually assaulted. Jewelry, a laptop, and some cash were taken, but Ngugi maintained to Jaggi:

“It wasn’t a simple robbery. It was political—whether by remnants of the old regime or part of the new state outside the main current. They hung around as though waiting for something, and the whole thing was meant to humiliate, if not eliminate, us. . . . We think there’s a bigger circle of forces—not just those who attacked us.”

Three security guards and a nephew of Ngugi’s by marriage were apprehended, and their trial is still going on. The frequency of violent crime in Nairobi is itself perhaps adverse comment enough upon the forces at work in postcolonial Africa. The forces ensconced in Ngugi’s imaginary Free Republic of Aburiria, the venue of “Murogi wa Kagogo,” are demonically malign, and even the benign counterforces partake of magic and sorcery. English-language readers can now explore Aburiria in an English translation by the author, under the title “Wizard of the Crow” (Pantheon; $30).

Such readers would do well to remember that it is a translation from a language whose narrative traditions are mostly oral and heavy on performance; the tale is fantastic and didactic, told in broad strokes of caricature. Its principal political actors wear physical distortions like large, firelit masks. Aburiria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Markus Machokali, had been an ordinary Member of Parliament until he went to London for plastic surgery to enlarge his eyes, “to make them ferociously sharp, or as he put it in Kiswahili, Yawe Macho Kali, so that he would be able to spot the enemies of the Ruler no matter how far their hiding places. Enlarged to the size of electric bulbs, his eyes were now the most prominent feature of his face, dwarfing his nose, cheeks and forehead.” A rival, Silver Sikiokuu, observing Machokali’s subsequent promotion, flew to Paris and had his ears made “larger than a rabbit’s and always primed to detect danger at any time and from any direction”; he is named Minister of State, “in charge of spying on the citizenry.” A third aspirant to high office, Benjamin Mambo, had his tongue elongated in Paris, but “the tongue, like a dog’s, now hung out way beyond his lips, rendering speech impossible,” until a remedial operation in Germany extended his lips so “the tongue protruded just a little.” A late entrant to the halls of power, John Kaniuru, is known as Johnny the Nose, John Nose, or “the nosy one.”

As for the nameless Ruler, he gradually grows larger all over, through a mysterious complaint diagnosed as a full-body pregnancy, until his head scrapes the ceiling of even the grandest chamber of state. When he at last bursts, around page 700, he gives birth to an abortive Baby Democracy and a cloud of foul-smelling smog that permeates the capital, Eldares; from his ordeal the Ruler emerges slender as a snake, with a head “the size of a fist” and a flickering tongue observed by at least one keen-eyed witness to be forked. “Wizard of the Crow”’s fantasia of corruption and malformation is erratically filtered through the excited, drink-primed telling of an ordinary policeman, a delegate from the everyday—Constable Arigaigai Gathere, known as A.G. Any inconsistencies or vague spots in A.G.’s and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s tangled tale are passed off as an aspect of oral narrative, wherein auditors repeat to others what they hear and thereby every listener becomes “a teller of tales, insisting on his own authority.”

The forces of evil in the seething dictatorship of Aburiria are gamely resisted by a young couple, Kamiti wa Karimiri (sometimes known as Comet Kamiti) and Grace Nyawira, who has her own gifts of shape-shifting and deception. The two meet in the office of Eldares Modern Construction and Real Estate, where Grace is the boss’s secretary, and Kamiti applies for a job. Though the young man holds a B.A. in economics and an M.B.A. earned in India, the boss, Titus Tajirika—who turns out, in the many plot twists ahead, to triumphantly embody the indestructible spirit of Aburirian venality—denies him a job. The secretary, however, follows Kamiti when the office closes, and a beautiful liaison begins. Soon they meet again, disguised as beggars, and take refuge in her house. There they talk and tussle; as their clothes slip off, he is transfixed by “her long gazelle neck, her shapely breasts so full, her nipples, the color of blackberry, so erect,” but, since he fails to produce a condom, he wins only a stern lecture on AIDS and V.D. Later, when she has pursued him across the plains to his mountain haven, he still hasn’t learned his lesson. “I am sorry that I don’t have any condoms,” he sheepishly says, and again encounters contradiction:

On the ground, in the cave, now wrapped in darkness, they found themselves airborne over hills and valleys, floating through blue clouds to the mountaintop of pure ecstasy, from where, suspended in space, they felt the world go round and round, before they descended, sliding down a rainbow, toward the earth, their earth, where the grass, plants, and animals seemed to be singing a lullaby of silence as Nyawira and Kamiti, now locked in each other’s arms, slept the sleep of babies, the dawn of a new day awaiting.

O.K.—back to saving Aburiria. Kamiti when we first see him is airborne; light-headed from hunger, he collapses at the foot of a mountain of garbage where he is foraging, and sees himself from on high. His “bird self” hints at an unusual disposition, as does a preternatural sense of smell that nearly overwhelms him with a “stench blast” when he is near money or greedy people, and that signals Nyawira’s proximity with a powerful smell of flowers. Fleeing the police in the wake of a political protest, he and Nyawira improvise a fetish of bones and rags and he pens a warning: “THIS PROPERTY BELONGS TO A WIZARD WHOSE POWER BRINGS DOWN HAWKS AND CROWS FROM THE SKY. TOUCH THIS HOUSE AT YOUR PERIL. SGD. WIZARD OF THE CROW.” The highly suggestible Arigaigai Gathere reads the message and quickly propagates to the nation word of a wonderful wizard. Indeed, Kamiti, so unprepossessing that he has failed to find a job in three years of looking, does show a knack for consultation and healing. When, newly rich on consultation fees, he visits his home village, his father reveals that his grandfather Kamiti wa Kienjeku was “a holy seer, a spiritual leader working with forces fighting the British in the war of independence.” As if this genetic evidence needed cinching, his father explains, “With us, seers are born holding a seashell; and my son, you were born gripping a shell in your little fist.” Kamiti’s resourceful sessions with the disturbed and the possessed form some of the relatively few passages where the novel lifts free of performance into human interest. His example spawns, in bedevilled Aburiria, a plague of “afrochiatrists.” When the Wizard, with his moral scruples and self-doubts, is not onstage, the novel becomes puppetry, a Punch-and-Judy show whose grotesque politicos keep whacking one another.

The political development worth protesting is, in a novel rife with Biblical allusions, the government’s determination to build, as a birthday present to the Ruler, a kind of Tower of Babel—“a building to the very gates of Heaven so that the Ruler could call on God daily to say good morning or good evening or simply how was your day today, God?” The project, called “Heavenscrape or simply Marching to Heaven,” overflows with opportunities for graft but needs the support of the Global Bank, whose representatives pay diplomatic visits but do not quite commit. Against the giant boondoggle of Marching to Heaven stands the subversive but widespread, strongly feminist Movement for the Voice of the People, of which Nyawira is a leader. The members of the movement scatter plastic snakes and embarrass the government whenever they can, performing obscenely, for example, as dancers at a state ceremony.

The author of this bulky book offers more indignation than analysis in his portrait of postcolonial Africa. The days of the flamboyantly costumed independence leaders, with their theatrical fly whisks (like Kenya’s founding father, Jomo Kenyatta) and “monkey skins, dashikis, or collarless shirts,” are over; Aburiria’s Ruler is “always in Western-style suits,” albeit “decorated with patches from the skins of the big cats.” Like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, he wears a leopard-skin hat. His suits, tailored in Europe, have pinstripes “made of tiny letters that read MIGHT IS RIGHT.” The passing of the Cold War is felt keenly by his ilk: “The Ruler . . . missed the cold war, when he could play one side against the other.” Now “there was only one superpower and it knew only how to be wooed, not how to woo.” The Global Bank is a cat’s-paw of the United States, whose envoy, accompanied by Ambassador Gabriel Gemstone, tries to explain to the Ruler the new situation:

We are in the post-cold war era, and our calculations are affected by the laws and needs of globalization. The history of capital can be summed up in one phrase: in search of freedom. Freedom to expand, and now it has a chance at the entire globe for its theater. It needs a democratic space to move as its own logic demands. So I have been sent to urge you to start thinking about turning your country into a democracy. Who knows? Maybe with your blessings, some of your ministers might even want to form opposition parties.

The Ruler, however, prospering for so long under the rule of disorder (“for any attempt on the part of the people to organize themselves was deemed by the Ruler’s government as a challenge to its authority”), cannot adjust to the new realism. His code, written out in his own testament “Political Theory,” asserts, “Real crooks are guided by realism.” On this principle he promotes the thoroughly, helplessly venal Titus Tajirika, who has had his sympathetic moments and his momentary reversals but keeps bouncing back. The Ruler “had started to think well of Tajirika the moment he realized that the man was a crook,” who could be entrusted “with any task that required bending or breaking the law under the guise of legality.” Extreme crookedness insures extreme loyalty to another crook, he reasons.

And where does all this—seven hundred and sixty-six pages of fiction too aggrieved and grim to be called satire—leave Africa/Aburiria, “Aburiria of crooked roads, robberies, runaway viruses of death, hospitals without medicine, rampant unemployment without relief, daily insecurity, epidemic alcoholism”? Though there are some changes at the top, “shit is still shit, even by another name,” feisty Nyawira decrees. “The battle lines may be murky, but they have not changed.” The Wizard, more ambivalently surveying all that has passed, reflects upon another sort of line, “the thinness of the line that divided the real and the unreal in human lives.” The novel’s frequent recourse to magic realism, in the course of what its own text admits may seem “too incredible a narrative of magic and greed,” would seem appropriate to a culture so susceptible to the claims of the supernatural. But somehow magic realism still works best in the supple hands of Gabriel García Márquez and José Saramago. Discussing “Wizard of the Crow” with Charles Cantalupo, when the novel was still in progress, Ngugi declined detailed comment on its contents, saying, “The characters are engaged in the constant performance of their own being for the narrative. You never quite know who they are. Often they reinvent themselves through performance. Even I, as their author, do not know where or how the whole novel is going to end except in the constant performance of their own being.” The narrative, then, is a journey without a destination, and its characters are improv artists. This ambitious, long-mulled attempt to sustain the spell of oral narrative in an era of electro-visual distractions leaves the Wizard where the reader finds him, up in the air. ♦

John Updike contributed fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism to The New Yorker for a half century.